Tea with Liu Chuanzhi

Liu Chuanzhi describes his life as having had two distinct phases - before and after the creation of what is now Legend Holdings.

By
Craig S. Smith, Editorial advisor for
english.caijing.com.cn

(Caijing.com.cn)BEIJING - The elevator doors open
on the 10th floor and I’m ushered past a generic reception area and down a hall
lined with framed photographs of various moments in the short history of
China’s biggest computer company,
Lenovo. The photographs are amateurish: some are fuzzy enlargements, some have a
reddish tint, others were taken too close with a flash. Most were chosen because
they captured the presence of a powerful government official; Lenovo may be a
public company, but it remains firmly rooted in the state.

At the end of
the hall, my escort pauses at a plain brown wooden door. A brushed metal plate
on the door is stamped with the number 1001. There are no other markings. She
taps and opens it and I follow her through a small, crowded, windowless office,
its surfaces spilling with papers. A man behind a desk rises but we are already
headed through another door to meet the grandfather of China’s high
tech revolution, Liu Chuanzhi.

He is standing
and smiling. He offers his hand, mumbles a token greeting in English and steps
back to wave his guests through. The office behind him is another world: soft
and airy, with recessed lighting, pale silk-lined walls and welcoming armchairs
covered in creamy white leather. Gauzy beige blinds are drawn low over a wall of
windows. A spray of white orchids arc from the corner of a large desk stacked
with books. A place in each book is marked with a pale silk ribbon.

At this
critical juncture in the country’s economic development and an equally critical
juncture in Lenovo’s development, Mr. Liu finds himself in much the same
position as the country’s leaders: faced with a shrinking market overseas, he is
hoping the domestic market can pick up the slack. He has agreed to talk about
the problem over tea.

“For a
healthier Chinese economy, we need to have domestic demand and consumption to be
the main generator of our GDP,” he says, echoing a common theme expressed in
China these
days.

Mr. Liu is
understated and discreet, dressed in a dark sports jacket and slacks, a crisp
white shirt opened at the neck. He is wearing well-polished shoes, a domestic
brand of rubber-soled loafers. His eyeglasses are thinly rimmed in gold. At 64,
he looks trim and prosperous but that’s about all.

Certainly, there
is nothing to hint of his long journey from the dim halls of the research
institute that once stood on the grounds where this office tower now stands, nor
of the personal and political battles that he fought to reach room 1001.

While he sits
comfortably at the top of a global company, his rise comes from a remarkably
small geographic base: Zhongguancun, once a quiet neighborhood outside of the
Chinese capital where court eunuchs were laid to rest together with the private
parts they kept preserved in a jar. Beijing’s university quarter grew up around the
neighborhood and the China Academy of Sciences was eventually established there.
It was a leafy, low-rise landscape in 1970 when Mr. Liu arrived from an
obligatory year laboring on farms in Guangdong
and Hunan
provinces.

He was bright
and ambitious but China wasn’t yet ready for bright and
ambitious types, at least outside the realm of party politics. Scientific
research was like living in a room with no doors.

“Findings
weren’t used for commercial products,” Mr. Liu recalled, now seated in one of
the armchairs. “They just sat idle in the Academy unknown to the rest of the
world.”

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